"The series ends with an epilogue noting that, while the official death toll remains 31, other estimates have ranged from 4,000 to 93,000, with some estimates climbing even higher."
This was the worst moment in the series. The otherwise pretty solid description of the event was tainted by that. I screamed at the screen. The correct statement would be closer to:
"60 deaths have been directly attributed to Chernobyl, and large careful consortia of hundreds of scientists concluded in the 2000s that "up to 4000" early deaths may occur from the accident across the decades, though they later revised the statement to say they do not recommend multiplying small doses by large populations to get large death values. Meanwhile, a few fringe groups and Greenpeace said 93,000 and Helen Caldicott says millions just because she feels that it must be that high. By the way, burning fossil fuel kills 4 million people every year by air pollution. That's a Chernobyl every 2.5 days, day after day. So even though Chernobyl was horrible, the dispassionate numbers show that nuclear energy is still extraordinarily safe compared to other major forms of energy production. Plus it is very nearly carbon free, which matters more than ever today."
The UNSCEAR group with the 4000 number is analogous to the IPCC. The 93,000 and beyond people are analogous to the anti-vaxxers. The HBO series gave them equal weight.
I'm not knowledgeable on the subject, but reading the related wikipedia page [1], and in particular the section about liquidator mortality, leaves me skeptic about the <100 numbers.
And there are also deaths which are more loosely related, but still related. See for example the abortions: "an estimated excess of about 150,000 elective abortions may have been performed on otherwise healthy pregnancies out of fears of radiation from Chernobyl" [3]. Even if you consider most if not all of these ill-advised, these are nonetheless lives lost due to the disaster.
I personally continue to use 4000 deaths total (acute and latent), which is what the UNSCEAR folks said up until 2006 or so. Some colleagues yell at me and tell me that there's no basis for a number this high given what we now know about radiation dose response and about what's happened monitoring people for decades. But I use it just in case.
Fear of radiation kills thousands of people. At Fukushima, the only nuclear-related (non-tsunami) deaths were from the evacuation. (Up to 1 person did die from radiation, they say now). That's why I fight to make people understand it more and be less afraid.
We can all agree that unduly panicking people about radiation is bad.
That was in 2006. They changed their policy and stopped multiplying small dose rates by large populations to get large numbers after that because the linear-no-threshold assumption has not been shown to be applicable at very low doses. Their later reports do not give any large numbers like this.
But that's just even more arbitrary, right? It just means nobody knows how many deaths it caused, and there is an uncertainty of an order of magnitude based on how the effects of very low doses.
> See for example the abortions... are nonetheless lives lost due to the disaster.
Unless you have some additional evidence of euthanizing newborns or otherwise near-term pregnancies, abortions do not count as lives lost to the disaster to anyone but political reactionaries.
yep, pretty close. The cancer rates in the Gomel and Mogilev (2 regions where the majority of fallout happened) are significantly higher - like for example breast cancer is about 2 times - and that means several thousands extra deaths per year.
People talking about small/mild background level miss the point of the fallout. It isn't about background level, it is about radioisotopes, especially alpha generating ones, getting inside the body.
Citation needed for higher cancer in Gomel being significantly higher because of radioactive fallout from chernobyl causing several thousand extra deaths per year. Got a paper saying that that you could share? I ask because it contradicts what the WHO and UN have been saying for several decades.
Oh yeah I didn't mean to imply that the fringe group numbers are not published. There are a few groups who have published very high numbers. They are very fringe. For these big-science things you have to look at meta-analyses. An idea with a few publications should not be weighted evenly alongside one with thousands. That's my beef with the show.
The assumptions you have to believe to believe those numbers run into big trouble when you compare low natural background radiation areas with high background ones. For example, Ramsar, Iran has ~100 mSv/year background, compared to 3 mSv/yr in the USA. And Guarapari, Brazil has up to 30 mSv/yr. And smaller variations exist throughout the world. Yet we don't find statistically significant differences in cancer rates as a function of dose rate at any of these levels. So taking a dose rate far lower than these values, using a unjustifiably conservative dose-to-death conversion factor, and multiplying by large numbers of people is not a great method. This is what the UNSCEAR people came out and said in their recent reports. See section 3.1.f in the 2012 UNSCEAR report [1].
The UNSCEAR team also stopped saying their own 4000 and 9000 numbers because they also relied upon using the unjustifiable method of multiplying low doses by large populations too.
> In the published estimates shown, studies have utilised a methodology termed the ‘linear no-threshold model’ (LNT).
LNT is neither a method, nor is it a model. It is an assumption, which happens to be convenient for regulatory purposes. Let me quickly explain how it works.
Caffeine is poisonous with an LD50 of around 15g or about 100 cups of coffee. If two people each drink 100 cups of coffee, one of them is expected to die. If we now apply the "method" of LNT, it follows that if 200 people each drink one cup of coffee, one of them is expected to die. Moreover, since 85% of adult Americans consume on average 164mg of caffeine daily, which is roughly 30t in total, we can conclude that caffeine kills one million Americans every single day.
Now you can evaluate for yourself whether LNT makes any sense.
My apologies, but your analogy is flawed. An adverse effect of ionizing radiation is that it could cause a mutation that replicates (before it's caught by the immune system) - cancer. It's therefore intrinsically probabilistic: if you're exceedingly unlucky, a small amount of ionizing radiation could get you there. That does not apply to your caffeine analogy, which actually does have a threshold.
Now, there's indications that at least the linearity of the LNT model is off in that there IS any effect of the immune system on the outcome, but that at high doses, it may be suppressed thus making the response non linear. I'm sure there's other effects of that nature and I don't think this is particularly well understood. But I dare say the linear no threshold model is actually somewhat more supported by common sense than you imply. Your distinction between the words "model" and "assumption" is moot by the way. A model is an attempt to (typically mathematically) describe a complex process. That's always an assumption in that sense. :)
(Former high energy physicist. Not an MD. Not a medical physicist.)
> An adverse effect of ionizing radiation is that it could cause a mutation that replicates - cancer. It's therefore intrinsically probabilistic.
This statement betrays a very naive understanding of cancer and complete ignorance of DNA repair pathways. Don't take it personally - nobody understands cancer completely. However, we know that a single mutation will not cause cancer. Cells have "defense in depth" against adverse mutations. There are multiple repair mechanisms, DNA exists in four copies usable for reconstruction, and there are crowbar mechanisms that kill a cell when it detects damage, and there is an immune system which can kill rogue cells. Therefore, to cause cancer, a number of mutations is needed (probably around ten). Clearly, the risk of cancer isn't linear in the dose, it grows approximately with the tenth power.
There are other mechanism absent from your naive view. Ionizing radiation typically doesn't damage DNA directly (alpha radiation can cause double strand breaks, but beta and gamma don't). Rather, it creates reactive oxygen radicals which can oxidize DNA, causing miscoding lesions. (These are repairable, to some extent.) But cells contain compounds that scavenge such radicals (the most important one is glutathione). If glutathione has be exhausted before oxidative damage occurs, that creates a threshold effect.
So response to ionizing radiation is likely nonlinear and has a threshold. LNT is twice wrong.
> Your distinction between the words "model" and "assumption" is moot by the way.
Then I will make it more clear. A model is something that is tested and discarded if it turns out to be no good. An assumption is something that is kept despite failing the tests. LNT was based on nothing (Herman Muller made it up, claiming knowledge about how DNA is affected; and that was before the structure of DNA, let alone the existence of DNA repair was known), which may be forgivable. But it should have been discarded after its predictions didn't match the reality of the Nuclear Navy dock workers study, or the Taiwanese radioactive high rise buildings, or how low dose full body irradiation suppresses cancer instead of causing it.
I shouldn't have said assumption. Let's be honest and call it a dogma.
Thank you for the clear example that drives the point home.
LNT for radiation made sense in 1950 before we had sufficient data on how the body responds to radiation. Today, after carefully studying irradiated populations for 70 years, we know enough to conclude that it no longer makes sense.
This is a ridiculously bad analogy. It’s so bad, I would expect it only from right-wing disinformation efforts who are self-parodies of incorrectness.
There is no correspondence between an acute chemical poisoning mechanism and the mechanism of ionizing radiation induced illness for longer-term effects.
A more correct analogy for LNT, indeed, a “model”, would be a rifle fired at random in to a room. If there is one person in the room, there is say a 1 in 5,000 chance the bullet will hit them. If they are hit, there is a 1 in 10 chance they will die.
If you fire the rifle a million times in to a million rooms, you get a linear scale-up and expect 200 people to be hit, and 20 of them to die. It scales linearly, with no threshold below which the mortality rate declines.
If you pack the room with more people the probability of hitting someone goes up, etc.
Now there are indeed well-based arguments to say that there are indeed thresholds of effects of ionizing radiation, including studies where low ambient levels are present in populations, to studies attempting to show radiation hormesis effects. Those studies have not displaced LNT thus far because they are not clearly conclusive in understanding what they are saying.
LNT has been the standard for 70 years not because it was promulgated by idiots, but rather because it is a conservative protective measure designed by the best minds of the time, using the best information that was reliably known.
So please, discuss hormesis, show alternative models, etc., but please do not try to impugn the model as stemming from idiots - the Manhattan-era physicists were certainly miles smarter than anyone reading HN today - and has not been displaced yet because no one understands a better model of how to protect people from injury and death.
The way LNT works with radiation is that we knew a death-dose curve from the atomic bombs in Japan at extremely high dose. This was acute radiation poisoning (comparable to chemical poisoning). This response curve is precisely the thing that has been extrapolated down to miniscule doses just above background. The analogy you are critiquing with acute chemical dose is right on.
The rifle fired at random in a room analogy is vastly more flawed and does not take into account how the body deals with radiation. There are cell damage events all the time, and there are repair mechanisms that fix them in the body at a baseline rate. These repair mechanisms make radioactive cell damage look a lot like chemical damage at low levels.
Radiation has been a part of the universe forever. 50% of the internal heat of the earth is from radiation. Space is radioactive. Cosmic rays rain down on us all day and all night. The body can and does deal with this, up to a point, after which it becomes inundated.
Thus, a small boost in radiation, far below natural background, cannot be expected to increase deaths.
> It’s so bad, I would expect it only from right-wing disinformation efforts who are self-parodies of incorrectness.
That's not very helpful. It would be helful, if you explained how it is a bad analogy for ionizing radiation. (By the way, that wasn't even the point. I merely explained LNT in a context where everyone immediately recognizes it as ridiculously wrong.)
> do not try to impugn the model as stemming from idiots
I would never! The guy who came up with LNT ten years after the conclusion of the Manhattan project, Herman Muller, was not an idiot!
> Oh yeah I didn't mean to imply that the fringe group numbers are not published
"they disagree with me so they must be fringe"
> Ramsar, Iran has ~200 mSv/year background
from wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar%2C_Mazandaran "Record levels were found in a house where the effective radiation dose due to external radiation was 131 mSv/a, and the committed dose from radon was 72 mSv/a.[8] This unique case..." Note the word unique.
So your claim for that area is in fact higher than the highest single location they found (one house), as I read it.
> See recommendation 1e
I would if I could find it. "1e" doesn't appear in that document. Could you quote it for us? Thanks.
That is not what I am saying. I am saying that they disagree with vast institutions of scientists who explain quite clearly in the above-linked report why they are wrong.
Regarding different background levels, I'm sorry if my numbers were not precise (I was reading them off of this DOE chart [1]), but the point remains that there are variation across at least 1 and almost 2 orders of magnitude in the world's natural radiation at dose rates far higher than what Greenpeace has used to make shocking Chernobyl estimates that can be used to robustly throw out the high-number estimates anti-nuclear institutions have used for years to scare people.
Does that make sense? Greenpeace is literally taking dose rates lower than US average background and saying that any increment even below that level will cause more Chernobyl deaths. This is unjustifiable by any stretch of any imagination.
Happy to quote. Sorry about not being specific enough about where it was. I even got the section wrong. The quote is from page 10 in the report (pg 18 in the pdf). Section 3.1.f:
"In general, increases in the incidence of health effects in populations cannot be attributed reliably to chronic exposure to radiation at levels that are typical of the global average background levels of radiation. This is because of the uncertainties associated with the assessment of risks at low doses, the current absence of radiation-specific biomarkers for health effects and the insufficient statistical power of epidemiological studies. Therefore, the Scientific Committee does not recommend multiplying very low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or lower than natural background levels; "
People have a ~50% chance of developing cancer and a ~20% chance of dying from cancer in their lifetimes. This means there are vast numbers of people very close to getting cancer at any time and there is no population wide safe exposure level.
To actually disprove the theory you need an experiment that can detect changes in cancer rate on the order of 40k per billion or 0.004% which have simply not been preformed.
Saying ‘we can’t measure it therefore it does not exist’ might be acceptable if it where the oldest theory. Except it’s not, people want to overthrow the existing idea with zero direct supporting evidence which is simply unscientific. If you want to supplant a theory then it’s on you to provide evidence that the existing theory is wrong, otherwise I can say low exposure levels are more dangerous because high levels result in multiple indecent cancers at the same time in some people. Therefore the risks increase at lower levels do to probability theory and we already agreed no evidence was needed.
PS: I am not saying my example is correct, just the argument your making is faulty.
> To actually disprove the theory you need an experiment that can detect changes in cancer rate on the order of 40k per billion or 0.004% which have simply not been preformed.
If the LNT model was correct then you wouldn't need such a high level of precision, only a sample group with more radiation exposure (i.e. a medium level rather than low or high), so that the LNT model would predict that enough people would get cancer that it could actually be measured. If the people in those areas don't have an incidence of cancer which is linear with respect to the very high doses currently being used as the baseline then the LNT model is falsified.
> Saying ‘we can’t measure it therefore it does not exist’ might be acceptable if it where the oldest theory. Except it’s not, people want to overthrow the existing idea with zero direct supporting evidence which is simply unscientific.
By this logic we should be operating under the assumption that the Greek Gods actually exist because the theory is very old and it is difficult to measure.
If the LNT model was correct then you wouldn't need such a high level of precision, only a sample group with more radiation exposure (i.e. a medium level rather than low or high), so that the LNT model would predict that enough people would get cancer that it could actually be measured. If the people in those areas don't have an incidence of cancer which is linear with respect to the very high doses currently being used as the baseline then the LNT model is falsified.
The problem with this assumption is you can’t keep everything else identical. Population X and Y don’t grow up live and die in exactly identical areas expect for different radiation levels.
What you can do is control for as many factors as possible or use a proxy. It turns out skin cancer is a solid proxy, * and populations like Australia and skin cancer support the linear model down to the limits of our ability to detect it. But, then people want to suggest the non linear model kicks in as soon as the signal falls below the noise floor without evidence, even though that’s the same behavior in both models.
* As in you can detect population differences and work out whole body radiation dose equivalents.
PS: By this logic we should be operating under the assumption that the Greek Gods actually exist because the theory is very old and it is difficult to measure. People are promoting a new idea, not just trying to disprove an old one. Aka, Greek gods and the flying spaghetti monster have equal support. That’s absolutely fine, it’s saying some other untested theory is supported without evidence that’s at issue.
> The problem with this assumption is you can’t keep everything else identical. Population X and Y don’t grow up live and die in exactly identical areas expect for different radiation levels.
For most other things you would do a placebo controlled trial, but it might be hard to get people to sign up for a trial where you're giving them enough radiation to expect to cause a significant number of them to get cancer.
So controlling for confounders is really the only thing left if you want an answer.
And it works pretty well -- at least better than nothing -- if you actually want the answer. The problem with it is that it unfortunately can also produce whatever answer you want from a political perspective by reverse engineering which confounders to control for based on which ones shift toward the desired outcome, so you can't trust somebody else to do it for you without checking their work at a level of detail that basically amounts to redoing the analysis yourself.
Doesn't that require assuming the conclusion? If LNT is wrong then skin cancer shouldn't be linearly proportional to radiation exposure either.
Plus, you still have the same problem with confounders. Expect more skin cancer in a population that spends more time outside, but also potentially a very different lifestyle in that case.
And problems with radiation type as well, since many types of radiation don't penetrate the skin, so they could cause skin cancer but not other cancers. Which has implications for the fatality rate because skin cancer has a much higher survival rate than most other types.
You’re always stuck building a model and testing it in any case. The point is you don’t need to adjust for many common causes of cancer like smoking, so it’s a simpler model.
In the german wikipedia edition 814 mSv/a is mentioned (based on the linked study) for Ramsar, Iran. To be fair, a comment has been added stating:
"Allerdings dürfte bei etwa 33.000 Einwohnern Ramsars die Kohortengröße von weit unter 5 % für die über 100 mSv/a Exponierten wahrscheinlich zu gering sein, um statistisch signifikante Gesundheitsfolgen festzustellen."
Translated:
The size of the measured cohort of 33.000 inhabitants of Ramsar of less than 5% for >100 mSv/a exposed participants is probably too small to allow to derive statistically significant health-related conclusions.
You could also say they gave equal weight to the lower number 31.
Some of those HBO folks realize the same sort of biases for overreporting also apply to people in positions of power, who will do anything to control the narrative. In some countries they just kill the journalists (a different sort of fallout that is also not directly attributed to radiation)
The show's writer has been pretty clear that he sees this story as a cautionary tale about our current governments ideological refusal to accept climate science and the politically driven lies that dominate all public discussion.
And when the ruling party has taken that same anti-science attitude when dismantling our pandemic response (as well as all other areas where the US has strong science), we now end up with massive loss of life, and massive economic losses, that would have been completely unnecessary with just a small amount of scientific leadership.
And I don't think any of us realized how quickly our science and leadership had been dismantled. There were cautionary stories telling us this in 2018 when it happened, but with all the other distraction and lying going on, it was completely lost.
Other countries hadn't realized just how far we had fallen either, and our lack of throwing up a warning signal probably made other countries think that SARS-CoV-2 wasn't as threatening as it was, because we were all used to competent pandemic response being helpers by the US. For example, during our prior president's term, we helped a lot with Ebola, which our current president criticized heavily, yet when given a chance to respond, did not manage it any better than Italy or Spain, and in fact quite a bit worse than those governments.
The cost of lies are massive. A few people in tech, including some prominent investors, think that politics is a realm where reality can be manufactured. And to some degree it can, particularly with economics. But when it comes to the physical world, such attitudes are disasters waiting to happen.
> Chernobyl is ultimately a deeply frightening story about the danger of refusing to accept reality in favor of political ideology. The Soviet Union provided many examples of this danger, but such refusal is not only a Soviet phenomenon. Chernobyl is a reminder that lies have a cost and, eventually, reality will catch up with you.
As a thought experiment, substitute climate change for Chernobyl and US for Soviet Union.
The better comparison is China and covid 19. Same type of government and nearly the same reaction. The difference is this one did affect the world in profoundly harmful ways and quickly at that.
This is true. But when China finally appreciated what was happening it dealt with it internally - reportedly through methods available only in totalitarianism.
Compare that to the US or UK (and probably others). They had plenty of warning and arguably more time than China did. They have done very badly and some of the claims and events have been dark comedy.
Not sure it's a fair analogy. Even while they were being deceitful, the Soviet Union seems to have at least invested a serious effort into tackling the problem head-on.
At various points in the series, the motives of different characters are shown to be driven by external incentives:
- the chief scientist wants to pass this test and get promoted
- the manager guy received a medal for completing the reactor construction early. he also had to maintain output to meet quota for the month
- the local council decided to not evacuate because the would get some recognition.
There are many characters that are so caught up with their own rat race that they are oblivious to reality.
I find this somewhat analogous to large corps and middle management. (a recent example is Well Fargo and the multiple accounts scandal).
It's interesting how these types of structures (i guess i'd call it bureaucracy) are independent of political and financial systems.
They are not independent of political systems. When you have an independent party check the work and incentives that align with doing the right thing, the right thing gets done.
In general, the most authoritarian the political system, the less you have both of those conditions.
The irony here is that the miniseries was itself propaganda denouncing lies. The underlying point rings true, but I kept seeing people watch it and feel somehow superior to those backwards soviets whilst seeing such a stacked narrative. As someone who used to work with radiation this really annoyed me.
The other thing I will add is that the miniseries drew heavily from Svetlana Alexievich’s master work ‘Voices of Chernobyl’, which I cannot recommend enough. Perhaps what really annoyed me is that the miniseries did a second rate job retelling people’s stories, while the book was so rich.
> but I kept seeing people watch it and feel somehow superior to those backwards soviets
Wow, that is not the message that I got at all and I didn't hear anybody else say that either.
It seems to be quite the opposite, we see lots of extremely skilled, brave people in the face of disaster and an oppressive social structure. If anything, it seemed to make explicit parallels between the current US people and our current political battles.
For example. the scene with the Ukrainian babushka milking the cow. Holy crap that was touching and felt so human. Made me feel so connected to a people on the other side of the world.
>> For example. the scene with the Ukrainian babushka milking the cow. Holy crap that was touching and felt so human. Made me feel so connected to a people on the other side of the world.
In that case I would highly recommend reading 'Voices of Chernobyl' - that scene (an several others) is lifted from it, and in my opinion Svetlana Alexievich is simply more talented and qualified to tell these people's stories.
The other thing I will add is that the miniseries drew
heavily from Svetlana Alexievich’s master work ‘Voices of
Chernobyl’, which I cannot recommend enough.
I think the book's title is "Chernobyl Prayer" and may be "Voices of Chernobyl" is the subtile. The edition (from Penguin) I am reading currently just has the title "Chernobyl Prayer". I haven't watched the series, but can't recommend the book enough, especially in these testing times where it is hard to get a good grasp of the situation unfolding. Sadly (as the book narrates) most of the people on the ground who were first deputed (forced) to carry out cleanup activities in the aftermath of Chernobyl were ill equipped, and many got exposed to high levels of radiation resulting in devastating consequences. This is not very different from the risks that many frontline workers fighting the current pandemic have to bear with.
Yes - the original translation into English used 'Voices', but 'Prayer' is the exact literal translation, and I have seen translations in the past ~5 years that use 'Prayer'. (my recollection is that this had to do with the understanding of prayer in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and trying to convey that meaning into English). In either case, the stories are perhaps more relevant than ever now.
> the miniseries drew heavily from Svetlana Alexievich’s master work ‘Voices of Chernobyl’,
Some criticize this, saying that it's not a reliable source. Personally, I agree with you that it's a master work really worth reading.
And I was frankly disappointed too by how the miniseries used Alexievich's work.
For instance, they turned the deeply poignant love story between a condemn fireman and her devoted wife into some empty crap in which both individuals are just oblivious to the drama in their life.
I don't even understand the logic!
A Nobel price author gives you the most beautiful scene in which a bedridden dying hero remembers to offer flowers to his wife on Victory day...
I can’t say I’ve got this impression from reading her books. Opposed to the state perhaps, but not the people. Her books are all about the mistreatment of people.
I’d particularly recommend The Unwomanly Face of War which is about women in the Soviet army in WW2, and Boys in Zinc which is about the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Edit: egao1980 is some sort of troll/propaganda account.
It would be a boring world if everyone just agreed with each other and had the same opinions.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.
The series is just a bunch of propagandist BS in a very nice package. The amazing number of factual errors given that not only documents but documentary footage are available along with internationally verified reports.
For me the miniseries nicely illustrated the fact that motivated reasoning will eventually clash with the physical reality and the costs may be pretty high.
The risk is especially high when the system enables coercion or manipulation to take place instead of persuasion, because motivated reasoning of a single actor with better access to the means of coercion or manipulation (typically a higher-positioned figure in hierarchical arrangements) might be acted upon regardless of its relation to the objective reality, as with Dyatlov.
On the other hand, some situations cannot be fully grokked by everyone given the objective constraints. Delegating decision-making is essential in such situations, thus Legasov.
to be honest I thought it did a good job of representing the fact their are heroes in all nations and in the end we are all the same. People bound up in world of incompetents and those who fix it and the everyday people who knowingly step into harms way because they know no other response.
>The series is just a bunch of propagandist BS in a very nice package
Exactly! The series very cleverly blends fact with fiction (suggestions/nudges/omissions/conspiracy theories) to give an illusion of how everything was the fault of the scheming Soviets.
It was quite enjoyable but viewers interested in veracity should consult other sources.
Presented in random order:
- Helicopter fell after entangling the rotor blades 6 months after the events;
- Scuba divers knew the layout of the station, there were
ankle high of water and 2 of them are still alive, third died of unrelated causes;
- Legasov was talking to Scherbina about failures of evacuation during https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident and not about how reactor works as it was common knowledge and Scherbina was experienced engineer who supervised energy sector in USSR;
- there were no forced labor neither for miner nor soldiers;
- miners knew and well respected Schadov, who was a miner himself. Needless to mention that he never came to any of the mines - there was a broadcast message that called for volonteers.
- Miners were enthusiastic and well compensated - they competed to go to the shaft. And they used proper tools. Documentary video exists.
- Vodka drinking in the middle of the harshest prohibition in Russian history. People could not get ANY alcohol for weddings still series shows vodka drinking on a high security object;
- Cherenkov radiation couldn't be visible in that situation;
- evacuation was swift and well organized;
- Legasov was not doing all the calculations alone he was a head of a whole institute;
- In helicopter scene Scherbina not only knew how reactor works but could not threaten Legasov as a) he can't order soldiers because chain of command b) Legasov has roughly the same political standing in USSR. Not to mention that Scherbina was quite nice person and was focussed on a problem at hand.
I agree about the bias and numerous inaccuracies and simplification but...
> evacuation was swift and well organized;
This could be argued.
It was not swift:
It took 36 hours for Prypiat to be evacuated, with people sunbathing and attending (dry) wedding parties in the mean time... The most elementary instructions (stay home, shut the windows) were not given for fear of appearing as "too alarmist".
And it was not that well organized:
For instance, the buses used for the evacuation came from Kiev and were used immediately after on their normal routes without prior decontamination.
I'm not even going to talk about the handling of the May 1st, Workers day celebration, unnecessarily maintained despite alarming contamination levels in the atmosphere.
Source: Serhii Plokhy's book "Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy" (2018)
> Miners were enthusiastic and well compensated
I think it's difficult to convey now the level of patriotism in the mind of the miners and soldiers. Maybe courage has declined so much that our societies can't comprehend it anymore. I've read that soldiers were promised big compensations but didn't receive anything though (or maybe inflation ate it up).
For me the biggest problem was the usual naive way scientists and science are presented in movies. The know it all, all rational super human hand-bound by obscurantist authorities.
First of all, there were emergency protocols in place and radiation levels were monitored. While there was hope that incident could be contained and radiation levels were low no evacuation were needed, but it was planned and prepared. Imagine moving 35000-50000 people while providing food and accommodation.
Moreover if you compare it to Three Mile Island incident this was done faste and was organized better.
It's not about patriotism. Similary to volonteers during COVID outbreak people knew the danger but felt that they need to do something to prevent graver harm to society and people. Please note that we're talking about 1980s and Soviet people were properly informed about radiation and its effects.
> While there was hope that incident could be contained and radiation levels were low no evacuation were needed
Excuse me, hope? Evacuation was not necessary because there was hope that things weren't as bad as they have turned out to be?
And honestly, as someone who has heard a billion Russian jokes about "volunteers" in the USSR, every time you use that word is jarring to me. I'd share the anecdotes with you, but I suspect you already know most of them.
Reasons for hope - no elevated radiation levels, still unknown scale of destruction to the core. As soon as things were getting known next stages of protocol were brought in action.
In this case we know for sure it was volonteers. First of all most of them are alive and USSR is long gone, so they'd already came up with their stories of forced participation. You just trying to diminish geunine heroism of people just because they lived in USSR.
The handling at Windscale was even worse. Even before the 1957 fire, the neighboring villages and countryside were getting contaminated daily without any authority doing anything about it.
But I think it's also well documented now that the Ukrainian communist local authorities could have handled the evacuation much better and much sooner. If only for having the tendency to wait for higher ranks from Moscow to take the difficult decisions for them.
This is all post-knowledge. You could have won the last year's lotteries given all the today's knowledge.
Emergency works on station began immediatly, specialists from Moscow were there in the early morning. There was no immediate need of evacuation at first according to dosimetry and prelimenary damage assessment. It took some time to realise the scale of destruction to the core zone and that triggered evacuation.
> 2 of them are still alive, third died of unrelated causes;
I’ve seen a number of different ends (continuations?) posited for these 3 guys. I tried to research and found about as much evidence that they lived happily ever after as they died immediately (i.e it’s a black hole of conjecture based on the particular writer’s feelings towards the Soviet Union).
Here's an inteview with one of them from 2019 [1], which would be pretty hard if he immediately died. I have never found any piece of evidence that they immediately died; most sources that say this seem to draw it from the HBO series as if it were a documentary.
> most sources that say this seem to draw it from the HBO series as if it were a documentary
That would be strange, because the series didn't show them die. And one of the epilogue screens said: "It has been widely reported that the three divers who drained the bubbler tanks died as a result of their heroic actions. In fact, all three survived after hospitalization. Two are still alive today."
This sounds like pedantry of the type where some people complain that in some war movie there were 43 Tiger tanks instead of 41.
Adapting history always requires results in modifications and the target is authenticity instead of complete pedantic accuracy.
As someone from Eastern block I feel like Chernobyl captures live in those times with authenticity - it somehow manages to capture attitude of population and their leaders to the point that's eerie for anyone who lived though it.
Perhaps step back and try seeing what the story is trying to show/warn about instead of being lost in checklist pedantry.
We have a very well studied incident, with all the actions of all the people involved studied by the minute. We have all the protocols in English as well. Veryfied and cross verified. Many hours of video and audio recordings. Interviews and accounts of participants.
And yet these guys distort the facts to sqeeze in an anti-Soviet agenda.
People volonteered to die there knowing the danger because they were preventing greater harm to others. And these series just diminishes their heroism. Smears both professionals, soldiers, miners and all the Soviet people.
Because USSR is evil, gloomy, vodka drinking gulag with psychopats in any post higher than a janitor. That's the basic impression these series try to give you.
> - there were no forced labor neither for miner nor soldiers;
Yes, I remember that it was a call for volunteers across institutions and there were surprisingly many of them even among people who knew what exactly this will cost.
People were carrying pieces of undeveloped film to determine cumulative level of radiation after trips there. All sorts of things, it was really tough there but moral was quite high.
A similar thing happened after the Fukushima disaster. People are remarkably altruistic and cooperative in these scenarios. Often times when society is under stress social order doesn't breakdown but instead becomes more rigid.
>> People were carrying pieces of undeveloped film to determine cumulative level of radiation after trips there.
This is still a standard dosimetry measurement in the West (film has a very long integrating time so cumulative exposure over a week or two can be reliably tracked).
I can do one! At one point they send in three people in scuba suits to drain the water out of the suppression pool. It is said that if the core falls into the water, a steam explosion with the force of (I believe it was) 4 megatonnes would occur, rendering Europe uninhabitable for decades.
Well, it turns out that if you postulate a fully liquid chernobyl fuel core and take its heat capacity and use that to vaporize an infinite supply of water (an easy worst-case thermodynamic calculation), you can see that this estimate was off by roughly 5 orders of magnitude. Someone said it best along the lines of: "if that were true, Hawaii would be blown off the face of the map multiple times daily."
Yeah, that was unfortunate. An engineer really did say that at a similar meeting but they were very wrong and everybody quickly realized they were wrong.
This was the worst moment in the series. The otherwise pretty solid description of the event was tainted by that. I screamed at the screen. The correct statement would be closer to:
"60 deaths have been directly attributed to Chernobyl, and large careful consortia of hundreds of scientists concluded in the 2000s that "up to 4000" early deaths may occur from the accident across the decades, though they later revised the statement to say they do not recommend multiplying small doses by large populations to get large death values. Meanwhile, a few fringe groups and Greenpeace said 93,000 and Helen Caldicott says millions just because she feels that it must be that high. By the way, burning fossil fuel kills 4 million people every year by air pollution. That's a Chernobyl every 2.5 days, day after day. So even though Chernobyl was horrible, the dispassionate numbers show that nuclear energy is still extraordinarily safe compared to other major forms of energy production. Plus it is very nearly carbon free, which matters more than ever today."
The UNSCEAR group with the 4000 number is analogous to the IPCC. The 93,000 and beyond people are analogous to the anti-vaxxers. The HBO series gave them equal weight.
Look it up! It is truly shocking.